Introducing Streaq - One Chapter a Day
How the two-day CODEX Hackathon
caused us to pivot after two years
Books can be tough to read. They can take hours, and before you know it you’re reading the same paragraph over and over again. However, books will change your life if you allow them to. Just keep in mind, the onus is on you to keep reading.
There was a clear moment during my sophomore year of college where I realized that I learned more from non-required reading like The Lean Startup, instead of sitting in a 300-person microeconomics class. It took me roughly 6 hours to read The Lean Startup, and all of a sudden I could turn an idea into a business? Powerful stuff.
However, there is a huge barrier to entry when incorporating books into one’s daily routine. Our mission is to help people overcome that barrier.
TL;DR: We did a massive pivot after two years and created a simple app that will help you read more consistently.
Intro — The Hackathon giveth, and the Hackathon taketh away.
Bookmarq was actually born at a hackathon in Sacramento two years ago, as bookbucket. Our goal was to help you find what books your friends and influencers are reading on a single app, so you don’t have to search Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. Since then, we’re happy to announce we were accepted into the 500 Startups x GA pre-accelerator program, by pitching Sean Percival over Twitter.
We heard about this publishing-oriented CODEX Hackathon in San Francisco that would take place June 27–28. It would occur the weekend after the program ended, so we wanted to work on something brand new as a mental break. While bookmarq is all about book discovery, another mission of ours is to improve book engagement — a.k.a., you’ve discovered a pile of 10 books to read, so what will get you to flip more of those pages?
We knew that there would be 100 or so “book people” there, so we decided to tailor our problem to this specific customer segment. Instead of asking “How can we get general people to read more?” we decided to ask ourselves, “What is holding these book-oriented-hackathon-goer-people back from reading as much as they’d like”? We narrowed our early adopter customer segment to 100 or so people.
The CODEX Hackathon
We came into the CODEX Hackathon with one mission: we wanted to solve book engagement and help people read more books. (nod to you, @rabois) We thought we had an answer: adding a chapter-by-chapter social function into our current app so you could keep track of how far your friends got as a motivator.
The last week of the program, a few days before the hackathon, we tested a few of our mocks using Invision with friends in the 500 office, and got meh results. We determined the results as inconclusive, but we obviously still had to proceed forward because, well, the mocks were so pretty! Nice job Igor.
Little did we know we’d make a huge pivot that weekend.
Introductions, Saturday 10:30 am
We stepped into Code for America on Saturday morning and started the with a design thinking workshop led by Erik Olesund of the Stanford d.school. The variety of people who were in the room was awesome: engineers, writers, designers, publishers, librarians. They each brought a different perspective on the publishing industry to the table.
Through a series of exercises, we proposed problems that we thought users faced, and then validated them by interviewing other hackathon participants. Then we came up with solutions to test.
Even though we had mocks ready to go when we showed up, the exercise helped us revisit the drawing board:
Problem Validation, Saturday 12:30 pm
- We came up with over 30 hypotheses as to why people don’t read as many books as they wish they did.
- We filtered them down to three categories: People are too busy, other activities take priority over reading, and a lack of social interaction when reading.
- We then went out to bother other teams with questions and had them share their burning problems around reading. Then we asked them to rank our 3 hypothesized reasons from most pressing to least.
- Most people found the idea of a “social reading experience” irritating and preferred to read in peace. The bottom line: people do not read as much as they’d like because they’re busy. The thing is, we believe people do have little bits of time in their day — checking email, FB, Twitter. We needed to help them find time they already had.
Building our Solution — Saturday 4:00pm
Wowza. We now had a new vision. Aka we “got out of the building” and figured out what the problem really was. We boiled it down to three potential solutions that would help folks overcome their sense of being too busy to read: prioritization of your to-read queue, gamification, and recurring notifications.
We narrowed down to a single product hypothesis:
Let’s solve the excuse of “being too busy” by building better reading habits through gamification.
Introducing…
The rules of streaq
- We want you to read at least one chapter a day. Did you succeed today? Great! Press that juicy button and add one point to your streak (below). Read where ever you want: in print, Kindle, or on a phone — just press that button after you read at least a single chapter that day.
2. Did you not read a chapter yesterday? That’s ok, you’re busy, we get it. Read one chapter to save your streak, but you’ll need to read two chapters to increase your streak (below).
3. But wait, you didn’t read for TWO days in a row? You’re in trouble. You now have to send a SOS to a friend if you want to keep your streak (below) or you can invite a new friend to use streaq. Be careful sending out SOS messages so freely by the way. Your friend’s streak will go down by one in order to save your streak. #socialAccountability
Aaaaand that’s the basic premise of how we set out to solve book engagement. Despite the over-simplification, we’re providing real value to readers here:
- We’re helping you build good reading habits.
- You’ll get an instantaneous reward for your good behavior.
- We added an element of social accountability.
- *BONUS* Could this be your keystone habit, the one habit which will help you build other habits to improve your life?
The Result, Sunday 3 pm
We shipped a mobile responsive version using FB OAuth and we’ll be launching our iOS version very soon. If you’d like to be part of the iOS private beta distributed via testflight, feel free to visit:
http://streaq.io
The Shock of the Pivot
It’s very easy to understand the mechanics of a pivot when reading famous case studies after the fact, but when you’re knee-deep in the process, that ‘understanding’ you thought you had gets foggier than a thick SF morning.
The Monday after (hackathon hangovers are a real thing!) at the 500 office, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves and every mentor around, “Are we in the middle of a pivot?” over and over again.
If you had told me last week that we would be pivoting our two-year old product after a two-day hackathon, I would have told you to shut the front door. Especially since we just finished sprinting non-stop focusing on bookmarq for four weeks.
Well, that’s what happens when you actually listen to your users and are flexible enough to enter a hackathon with an open mind. It’s funny that the seeds of our company were planted at a hackathon two years ago, and they might be in the process of being ripped out and replanted because of another one. The Hackathon giveth, and the Hackathon taketh away.
The Value of Niche Hackathons
While refueling our gas tanks with pizza and beer, I went up to (what I took to be) a random woman to ask for feedback on streaq. Turned out that she was the vice president for digital innovation at HarperCollins, Ana Maria Alessi (Here’s a Fast Company profile about her). She loved the simplicity, the idea that her kids could use it, and even started brainstorming with us. Receiving feedback from someone this experienced in the publishing industry was incredibly valuable.
Don’t forget to talk to people even while hacking all weekend. You never know who you may meet!
Try It!
Hopefully we can get casual readers (maybe such as yourself?) to read more books, one chapter at a time. Gamification, habit building, social accountability. If that doesn’t do it, will you please let us know what will?
Feel free to sign up for our private beta (ETA <1 week) at www.streaq.io, or if you have a friend who you think may like this, feel free to forward the link to them. :)
Shoutouts:
HarperCollins was one of the main sponsors of the event, as they were connected with Plympton (run by the amazing Jennifer 8. Lee), a literary studio based in SF that bridges the publishing industry and Silicon Valley. The accessibility to industry expertise was one of the things that made the CODEX Hackathon super valuable to us, especially as we were able to meet with them face to face in a casual setting instead of flying all the way out to NYC. Not only was HarperCollins there, but folks from Macmillan and Hachette, so three out of the Big Five publishers. (Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, we missed you!)
Thank you to @CodeForAmerica for the beautiful office space; Zoelle for arranging the amazing food; and Out of Print Clothing and Litographs for the amazing book shwag (Free library-themed socks!? The best).
